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TV Still Has a Hold on Teenagers

During a slow week for news last summer, the investment bank Morgan Stanley generated headlines when it sent out a research report about teenagers’ media consumption, based on the musings of a 15-year-old intern at the bank’s London office.

For those who missed it, here’s a summary: Teenagers like movies, music, video games and mobile phones. They like to pay as little as possible for them, or nothing at all. They use the Internet for social networking and other “fun” things when their homework is done. Twitter is pointless.

Most of this seems pretty obvious, though the response to the report demonstrated how desperate middle-aged media executives are to get their hands on any scraps of information about the next generation of consumers.

Taking up the challenge, the research firm Forrester conducted a survey in which it asked thousands of European teenagers about their media use patterns.

The results, published this month, portray a generation that, in some ways, is more traditional than some media executives might fear. And it seems that Morgan Stanley’s intern, Matthew Robson, is out of sync with the mainstream of European teenagers in a few of his media preferences.

Mr. Robson, for example, maintained that teenagers were watching less television because of the rise of online video services like the BBC’s iPlayer, which provides British viewers with a week’s worth of scheduled TV programming via the Internet.

Actually, according to the Forrester study, European teenagers still spend more time watching television than they do with any other medium — 10.3 hours a week, on average. That compares with 9.1 hours on personal — rather than work- or school-related — use of the Internet.

Perhaps more surprisingly, according to the report, 12- to 17-year-old Europeans appear to spend considerably less time on the Internet than people 18 and older, who are online 11.4 hours a week — again, not counting professional or academic use.

And what about the idea that teenagers are inseparable from their virtual friends on social networks? Only 41 percent of European teenagers visit social networks at least once a week, according to the study.

Instead, wrote Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester, “real-world social interaction with friends remains important for online teens.”

How novel.

Apparently, what teenagers like to do is to multitask — watch television while texting on their mobile phones, or play video games while listening to music at a friend’s house.

In some ways, the teenagers surveyed — in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden — appear to conform reliably with expectations. They are much more likely than adults to use YouTube and other user-generated video sites, for example.

The study also confirms — drumroll, please — that teenagers love video games, spending more than twice as much time playing them as people 18 and older.

But the Forrester study casts doubt on one of Mr. Robson’s assertions about video games: that “PC gaming has little or no place in the teenage market,” with teenagers vastly preferring console-based games. The Forrester study indicates that teenagers spend slightly more time with computer-based games than the console versions.

On one point, however, it appears that the Morgan Stanley intern and the Forrester study are in full agreement: the position of newspapers in teen-agers’ media universe.

“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarized on the Internet or on TV,” Mr. Robson wrote.

The Forrester researchers clearly took their cue from that statement. They did not even bother to report on whether teenagers read the papers.